Then two of the men hoisted her up by knees and shoulders, and carried her out of the room like a sack.
Winston had a glimpse of her face, upside down, yellow and contorted, with the eyes shut, and still with a smear of rouge on either cheek; and that was the last he saw of her.
He stood dead still.
No one had hit him yet.
Thoughts which came of their own accord but seemed totally uninteresting began to flit through his mind.
He wondered whether they had got Mr Charrington.
He wondered what they had done to the woman in the yard.
He noticed that he badly wanted to urinate, and felt a faint surprise, because he had done so only two or three hours ago.
He noticed that the clock on the mantelpiece said nine, meaning twenty-one.
But the light seemed too strong.
Would not the light be fading at twenty-one hours on an August evening?
He wondered whether after all he and Julia had mistaken the time--had slept the clock round and thought it was twenty-thirty when really it was nought eight-thirty on the following morning.
But he did not pursue the thought further.
It was not interesting.
There was another, lighter step in the passage.
Mr Charrington came into the room.
The demeanour of the black-uniformed men suddenly became more subdued.
Something had also changed in Mr Charrington's appearance.
His eye fell on the fragments of the glass paperweight.
'Pick up those pieces,' he said sharply.
A man stooped to obey.
The cockney accent had disappeared; Winston suddenly realized whose voice it was that he had heard a few moments ago on the telescreen.
Mr Charrington was still wearing his old velvet jacket, but his hair, which had been almost white, had turned black.
Also he was not wearing his spectacles.
He gave Winston a single sharp glance, as though verifying his identity, and then paid no more attention to him.
He was still recognizable, but he was not the same person any longer.
His body had straightened, and seemed to have grown bigger.
His face had undergone only tiny changes that had nevertheless worked a complete transformation.
The black eyebrows were less bushy, the wrinkles were gone, the whole lines of the face seemed to have altered; even the nose seemed shorter.
It was the alert, cold face of a man of about five-and-thirty.
It occurred to Winston that for the first time in his life he was looking, with knowledge, at a member of the Thought Police.
PART THREE
Chapter 1
He did not know where he was.
Presumably he was in the Ministry of Love, but there was no way of making certain.
He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain.
Concealed lamps flooded it with cold light, and there was a low, steady humming sound which he supposed had something to do with the air supply.
A bench, or shelf, just wide enough to sit on ran round the wall, broken only by the door and, at the end opposite the door, a lavatory pan with no wooden seat.
There were four telescreens, one in each wall.
There was a dull aching in his belly.
It had been there ever since they had bundled him into the closed van and driven him away.
But he was also hungry, with a gnawing, unwholesome kind of hunger.
It might be twenty-four hours since he had eaten, it might be thirty-six.
He still did not know, probably never would know, whether it had been morning or evening when they arrested him.
Since he was arrested he had not been fed.
He sat as still as he could on the narrow bench, with his hands crossed on his knee.
He had already learned to sit still.
If you made unexpected movements they yelled at you from the telescreen.
But the craving for food was growing upon him.
What he longed for above all was a piece of bread.